Former WeWork Korea chief's startup halts real estate brokerage service

Matthew Shampine, former general manager of WeWork Korea and CEO of proptech startup DN Korea / Korea Times photo by Seo Jae-hoon

DNK, established by former WeWork Korea General Manager Matthew Shampine, recently ceased its real estate brokerage platform service Dongnae, to focus on its property management software system known as DNK, targeting the Asia Pacific region, the company said Thursday.

Shampine, better known as the husband of actor Kim Soo-hyun, who played Claudia Kim in the Marvel movie series, established the proptech startup in 2020 and launched Dongnae the following year. But the CEO said Saturday that the company decided to stop offering the brokerage service.

"The last three months have not been easy, as we focused on accelerating the sunsetting of Dongnae FLEX, closed SocialDive and will be ceasing our operations at Dears Pangyo within the next week," Shampine said on LinkedIn. "In addition, we have decided to retire the name and branding of Dongnae."

"I want to sincerely thank everyone who has helped build the Dongnae brand and offerings throughout the years."

Through his business experience, he has learned the importance of a quality property management service (PMS) and will focus on DNK software services that are specialized for the Asia Pacific (APAC) market.

"The more we talked to other residential real estate operators in the region, the more we realized the need not just for a great PMS in Korea but one that works across the various markets in APAC. We would like to introduce DNK — the property management system built for the APAC region," the CEO added.

Kim In-song, co-founder and chief strategy officer of DNK, said the decision to cease the brokerage service is not due to the lack of funding or the worsened real estate market situation, saying that they decided to concentrate on offering a real estate brokerage software service for real estate rental agencies.

"Based on the choice and concentration strategy, we've decided to streamline our pipeline and focus on the DNK service among the various services we had offered," Kim told the Korea Times. "This was possible because we succeeded in advancing the quality of our software service, which can help real estate agencies in the Asia Pacific region better manage their rental businesses."

"We were running multiple services at the same time, and at the beginning of the business, we lacked software development know-how, but as we continued to run services, we were able to solve many of them with software. We thought that we had reached a point where we could sell only the software without operating the Dongnae service," the co-founder added.

DNK is currently focusing on the Korean and Japanese markets in the APAC region, Kim said.

"In Korea, DNK's services are currently available to real estate owners across the country, including the Seoul metropolitan area, while in Japan, the company concentrates on the Tokyo area."